


Infinite Cities

by norah



Category: Le città invisibili | Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
Genre: Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 20:11:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/norah/pseuds/norah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Great Khan rises and paces to his window, looking out across the gardens of his palace as though he can see - or perhaps hear - the cities Marco Polo describes if only he gazes long enough into the distance. </p><p>"No city such as the ones you have described to me can possibly exist," he says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Infinite Cities

**Author's Note:**

  * For [musicforwolves](https://archiveofourown.org/users/musicforwolves/gifts).



_The great Khan sits silent, listening to Marco Polo's fantastic tales of his empire. He has been listening for years, and yet the tide of cities, of stories, seems undiminished. Each time he believes that they have reached the last possible city, or that he has grasped the_ gestalt _of his growing, crumbling empire, Marco Polo will tell him of another city, where the denizens live beneath the water and can no longer survive in the air, or of a city built within a mountain, terraced caves both subterranean and exalted._

_But at last one evening, with the first haze of dusk falling over the bamboo hedges of the Emperor's gardens and a game board spread out between them, Marco Polo falls silent. He moves a game piece and sucks at his pipe. The Khan lets the silence spread out, rising and curling up with the smoke from their pipes, until it hangs over them and between them more loudly than words._

_Marco Polo does not produce from his satchel some marvelous unique salt, mined only in a town where people trade pieces of themselves with one another like tools, to accomplish the tasks set to them. He does not produce an urn from a city where dragons are raised as livestock, or a mask from a city of the dead. He does not sketch a new map in the clay tablet that is close to hand._

_Kublai breaks the silence. "Is that all, then, that you can tell me of my empire? Do I at last know all the possible cities, the probable cities, the unlikely and impossible cities?" He moves a game piece._

_And Marco Polo laughs._

_"No," he says, "If that has been your aim, it is an ill-conceived one. There are infinite cities, Great Khan. It would take lifetimes to know any one of them fully; to dream of knowing (or conquering) them all is a very foolish dream."_

_Kublai Khan looks at him, this strange man who would say such a thing to a Khan, and says, "And yet it is my dream, so why do you sit in silence? Tell me of another city."_

. . .

 

**Living cities 1**

The dusty streets of Selina, only three days' ride from your palace, Great Khan, are a maze of uneven twists and turns, all winding inevitably to the main plaza in the center of town. The old church at the city's heart rises above all the other buildings, spires reaching up to the heavens, buttresses tethering it to the earth. The windows of this great cathedral are cut and colored glass, and they blaze in bright sunlight, showing maps of another city, with another church at its center. 

The city's inhabitants pay no attention to the church windows save on Sundays, when young children fidget next to their parents and weave stories of that other town to themselves as the priests drone on. As for the priests, they hold as a primary article of their faith that all congregants hold within themselves separate cities, unknown and unknowable to the larger Selina, unknown and unknowable to the citizens themselves. They are stewards of those cities, blindly responsible, and you can see the belief in and the burden of that duty in the care the citizens take as they walk the winding streets, as they settle themselves carefully on the plaza benches, as they smile at one another. 

Inside Selina, then, are a thousand cities, as discrete as the bodies of her people. And within those cities, what roads, what temples, what further cities still? 

 

**Cities & language 3**

Late at night, after cups of wine, young men tell one another tales of the city of Marila. Many cities have their own dialects, accents, patois, but Marila has a language entirely her own; her inhabitants speak only through touch. In the fevered whispers of tipsy young men, the wide, straight streets of the city are filled with beautiful people who caress one another as they silently bargain over the day's shopping, cling to one another with secrets, embrace one another in companionable debate in quiet tea shops. 

Mothers tickle admonishments to their children and business is done with handshakes. People lean over the city's low walls and out the waist-height windows to brush a greeting over the shoulder of passers-by. Birds sing to one another over the silence of busy crowds in the open markets. There are no maps of Marila; to be lost in her is a pleasure and a privilege. Nubile young women, it is said, pull bemused travelers away to give them directions so detailed that they must be relayed in privacy, repeatedly. 

Other travelers returning from the city tell a different story, of being set on by old men who pat them down and take their valuables, of pokes in the eye and brawls in the street. They insist that Marila is a brutish city, where the growls of fighting dogs in alleys mingle with the scuffle and thud of a hundred conversations to form a dull backdrop to the visitor's growing disgust. The Marila they describe is wholly unlike the sensuous Marila of young men's wine-soaked fancy. Could there be two cities, the listener wonders, equally silent and tactile, yet so different at their core? 

Those who live there know that there is but one Marila, neither gentle nor violent, welcoming nor hostile. It is only that there are many travellers, and she has different things to say to each of them. 

 

**Cities & signs 6**

Leaving Marila and traveling west, in eight days the traveler hears Isabel before even a hint of the city is visible on the horizon. The distant buzz becomes louder as you descend into a rolling valley and approach the outskirts of the city, and as you ride into the town you can see that everyone - from the urchins playing in the street to the veiled old women taking tea on the carved wooden porches - is speaking at once. 

Should you attempt to speak directly to the citizens of Isabel, they will not respond; if you persist, they will become angry and turn their backs, talking all the while. It is not until one takes the time to listen that the protocol comes clear; in Isabel, it is the height of rudeness to address an individual directly. Like the concentric spiderweb streets of the city, all communication must go in circles before reaching its intended destination. The more formal and polite the conversation, the more people must relay it; between friends and family members one or two intermediaries may be enough. 

Everywhere throughout the city, everyone is speaking for someone else, passing on a lover's compliments or a barrister's summons, a teacher's instructions or a barber's question. Shopkeepers shout to passers-by to tell thieves to stop; children tell their neighbors to tell new playmates the rules of games. In the nighttime hours, only street cleaners, drunks, and whores whisper through window screens or mutter to one another around oil-drum fires, a dull hum of relayed conversations. But as the city wakes, the roar of this circuitous politeness rises, growing steadily throughout the day, floating out of the valley along all the approaches to the city, until the darkness falls once more. 

When asked how this custom evolved, the people of Isabel shake their heads in confusion once the question is relayed to them. It did not evolve, they tell someone to tell someone to tell the curious traveler. It has always been this way; how else should they speak? 

 

**Continuous cities 10**

There is a city on a hill, with flat-roofed houses on terraces like rice paddies rising up to a central mesa where the civic and economic life of the city play out. Each house is exquisitely painted with murals, and public sculpture is everywhere in the verdant parks and the mesa; the dishes on which its people dine are porcelain so thin it is almost translucent and the goblets from which they sip spiced wines are finer even than those in a king's palace. It is a beautiful city, which I will call Tatiana, for its people have no name for it. 

Their city exists in the perennial pre-dawn of language, an absence of words or substitute for words so profound that the city can tell, can live, only one story at a time. Each child in Tatiana learns the story as it is told and tells it to others with perfect fidelity, acting out a mummers' play of props and gestures and grunts to depict the actions they have memorized. Each man or woman in the city tells the story the same way, beginning far enough back that the audience can recognize their place in it and continuing through the entire sequence until the story reaches its known end. And then they add one detail, a toss of a ball, a kiss, another egg in the pan. 

It can take days to have a polite exchange in Tatiana, and years to exchange ideas. Tradesmen avoid the city, despite the exquisite craft of the wares found within its walls. To haggle with any one of the inhabitants is to witness and tell the same sequence of events over and over, with a mere coin or measure of difference at the end. Such extended negotiations may prove profitable to those who have the patience to spend weeks securing a caravan of goods; few if any outsiders will bother, and the people of Tatiana rarely travel. 

They have no need; they are content. They share their story with one another like a secret or a faith, something they all own wholly and in part and which few outsiders can understand or appreciate. Their days are filled with activities that do not require language: the pleasures of art and love. 

. . . 

 

_The Great Khan rises and paces to his window, looking out across the gardens of his palace as though he can see - or perhaps hear - the cities Marco Polo describes if only he gazes long enough into the distance._

_"No city such as the ones you have described to me can possibly exist," he says._

_Marco Polo shrugs. "They existed on my travels. Perhaps they were once otherwise. Perhaps a traveler visiting Tatiana now would find a city of thieves, who steal one another's things in an endless round of taking and having and losing. Perhaps those thieves would, in time, become saints, having cultivated a perfect detachment from the material life of this world, in all its ephemerality. Perhaps before I die I shall return to find only rolling hills, crumbling walls, and echoes. But when I visited Tatiana, it was a city possessed by an ongoing, singular story, and it is thus that I remember it."_

_"And what is this story they tell one another, in Tatiana, then?" Kublai asks._

_"I do not speak their language, any more than I once spoke yours, Great Khan," Marco Polo replies, contemplating the position of pieces on the game board before him. "But roughly translated, it is only that story which I have just now told you."_

**Author's Note:**

>  
> 
> A million thanks to my betas, whom I will name at the reveal.


End file.
